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It might sound like “asking the right questions” is a trivial, simple or even irrelevant job. It is not. Thackara’s point in “In the Bubble” is that the context has become so complex, fast-moving, global, and even invisible, that design has become a wholly different field than it has been in the past. In a readable mix of statistics, anecdotes, and analysis, Thackara details problems of sustainability, environment, population, and sprawl as problems of design. Problems which cannot be solved by simply making more pretty stuff. Current ideas about Ubicomp, or “ambient smart computing” don’t seem to be the answers, either; the “invisible computer” might merely make us more passive consumers of technology. Instead, Thackara asks designers to contribute to the design of services, relationships, and business models.

He begins with a chapter on “Lightness”, which is a central theme throughout the book. In a world of endless cheap goods, most people are unaware of the hugely wasteful resource expenditures that go into producing, say, a computer. You may remember the promise of the “weightless” economy in the 1990’s, but as Thackara points out, the truth is pretty heavy:

Only six per cent of the vast material flows in the US economy, for example, actually end up in products. The overall ratio of waste to durable products is closer to a hundred-to-one. Most so-called advanced economies are less than ten percent as energy efficient as the laws of physics allow.

So is “Lightness” just a call for designers to “do more with less”? Yes and no. Of course, asking us to use resources effeciently, and sustainably, is part of Thackara’s project. But he’s really also asking for designers to make those resources visible. Did it really take a couple of thousand pounds of material resources to make that computer? What if consumers could be made more aware of that inefficient flow? Bruce Sterling talks about future designed objects—“Spimes”— that “are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story. Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.” (Actually, Sterling talked about “Blobjects, Ruling the Earth. Not just littering it: ruling it.” He’s way more fun to read than Thackara.) Spimes even have future histories, embedded instructions on how to dispose of or recycle them.

Further, Thackara describes “Lightness” as an organizing principle for businesses themselves. His extended example is BodyMedia. BodyMedia initially conceived of around 1999 as a consumer health-monitoring product (which didn’t sell well), then as an online service (which proved expensive and complex), and finally as an integrated product and service, sold through insurance companies. For a company that could easily have been just another dot.com, BodyMedia’s tenacity is impressive. This kind of business model agililty was nicely summarized in a post by Jason Fried of 37Signals as striving for “Less Mass”: “You’re not going to get it right the first time. Change must be easy and cheap.” His lists of “heavy” impediments to change and “light” solutions is worth thinking about. Adaptive Design and the growing importance of open, or at least hackable frameworks are other ways to increase this kind of “Lightness.” “Web service mashups” are already on their way to becoming last year’s meme, but user innovation with these services is impressive. Who’ll be the first company to figure out a business model based on Greasemonkey?

But back to “In the Bubble”. Nearly all of the one-word chapter titles (“Flow”, “Lightness”, “Speed”) were themselves the themes of various Doors conferences; the rest of the chapter titles certainly could have been. Thackara makes liberal use of Doors participants’ work, and in many places cites their on-stage talks from the conferences. Though in places this feels like clubby elitism, in general it’s a good approach. Doors has involved biologists, community activists, artists, architects, designers, musicians (once even a piano tuner), businesspeople, and politicians. There’s a real coherence to “In the Bubble” that comes from so many of his sources having had some personal interaction with each other and with Thackara himself.

The downside of that chumminess is that Thackara’s not really being terribly critical here, even though I think he believes he is. For all of his complaints about the design decisions of corporatations or governments, he’s far too much of an insider in those worlds to really offer deep criticism of them. This is especially obvious in the language of the Introduction (excerpted at his site) and Chapter 1. Although he’ll needle easy targets, like Prada’s pretentious failures, I often found myself wishing he’d go in for the kill and really tear apart some foolish, wasteful project. But the most he ever really musters up are some gently scolding rhetorical questions: does this gizmo sound like the sort of thing we really need? Do we really trust technologists to make such and such a decision?

Considering how up-to-date most of the book feels, there are some odd omissions. It’s surprising how rarely Thackara mentions video games, considering how much they’d add to his arguments. (Indeed, one of the few Doors of Perception conferences poorly represented in “In the Bubble” is 1998’s “Play”.) In “Literacy” he discusses the cultural and economic value of systems literacy, signal-to-noise literacy, and the ability to interpret dynamic “dashboards.” That’s gaming. His description of innovative uses of sound cues in systems monitoring technologies ignores the most obvious and sophisticated examples of dynamic audio in games. Although I’ve only read the New York Times excerpt of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You , there’s a lot there on what video games teach players about narrative complexity, resource management, and “social literacy”.

Although readers looking for deeply theoretical analyses of contemporary design might be disappointed, “In The Bubble” is a very worthwhile read. Thackara’s making some real demands of designers, ones which feel both thrilling and overwhelming.